Thirty years ago, a group of determined workers challenged
the power of the British state. How close the miners came to defeating the
Thatcher regime – with some Tories fearing a “revolutionary” confrontation – is
revealed in cabinet papers released today.
They show that on two occasions in the 1984-5 strike for
jobs, the Tory government thought they would have to concede on their plans to
shut over 70 pits. The first was in the summer of 1984 when dockers went on
strike. And the second time was when pit managers voted overwhelmingly to join
the mineworkers.
Thatcher and her cabinet considered placing armed
forces on the streets when dockworkers came out. But the cabinet was
concerned that a state of emergency would lead to an extra-parliamentary
challenge with “a revolutionary strategy”, in the words of Conservative policy
chief John Redwood.
The National Coal Board, police authorities and local courts
had to be stiffened up in the face of foot-dragging and “crumbling”, the
minutes record. But using the army was a
high-risk strategy, as an opinion poll showed that 71% of the country was
against the deploying troops.
Thatcher sought out transport union leaders to call off the
strike, her own notes reveal. The dockers returned to work after ten days,
leaving the miners on their own. As we know, Arthur Scargill, the much-vilified
miners’ leader, was proved right. A mass pit closure programme began in the
years that followed and the industry is no more.
The cabinet papers only tell part of the story. The deeper
secrets about the crucial turning points in the year-long confrontation between
the miners and the state remain hidden. What was the role of the spy agency MI5
and why did the pit deputies union NACODS refuse to join the National Union of
Mineworkers in strike action to oppose pit closures?
In the end, troops were used, but secretly dressed up as
police constables on the picket lines. A combination of agents provocateurs within the NUM and the compliance of the Trade
Union Congress proved sufficient to isolate the miners. They returned to work
in the spring of 1985 without an agreement over closures.
The miners’ strike was a watershed in recent history. The
years of trade union militancy versus governments was followed by the
post-modern 1990s. These saw the collapse of the Soviet Union along with the rise
of debt-fuelled corporate globalisation as the entire planet was drawn into
unfettered forms of capitalist production and trade.
Through the creation of global trade bodies serving
transnational corporations, national politics was transformed. Decisions which
affect the lives of voters are now taken by bureaucrats in far away places.
Political parties have adapted themselves to declining levels of participation
and involvement in party activities by using the state in a “collusive manner”,
in the words of the late political scientist Peter Mair.
Today’s liberal capitalist form of democracy has become an
empty shell, paradoxically in the decades when leaders of the capitalist world
hailed their “triumph over communism” and declared that history had “ended”
with the Western political model.
The further irony is that understanding the terminal decline
of bourgeois democracy, whilst analysed by a left political theorist, remains
alien to large swathes of today’s anti-establishment movements.
Mair believed that the source of today’s deep political
dysfunction and malaise was the result of societal change, supranational
European institutions, and globalised markets, as Kurt Richard Luther has
written in a tribute to Mair’s work:
“The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties
themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from wider society, and
pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning that they no longer
seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.”
The miners’ rightly saw the state as their enemy, just as
today it stands between ordinary people’s aspirations and their achievement. Putting
forward proposals for a real, deep-going form of democracy through a
transformation of the political system is a key project that the Agreement of the People campaign
will pursue in 2014.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
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